A large amount of electrical energy needs to be consumed for daily operation of a network, and power consumption spending consumes a large quantity of network operation and maintenance costs. Therefore, generally, when network load is light, network traffic may be aggregated into part of links on the network for transmission, and links, on the network, that bear no network traffic are turned off or in a sleeping state, thereby saving overall power consumption of the network. When the network load rises, in order to avoid network congestion, sleeping links need to be woken.
In the prior art, a sleeping link is generally woken in the following two manners: in a first manner, a sleeping link is woken by using a timer, that is, when the link enters a sleeping state, a timer for the sleeping link is set, and when the timer expires, an event for waking the sleeping link is triggered and the sleeping link is woken; and in a second manner, a sleeping link is woken by means of network management, that is, a network administrator records and maintains a state of a link, and when the network administrator makes, by determining network load, a decision that a sleeping link needs to be woken, the network administrator delivers an instruction according to a network management protocol, to wake the sleeping link.
However, when a sleeping link is woken by using a timer, actual load of a network cannot be responded to, and therefore, the sleeping link cannot be woken according to the actual load of the network in a timely manner; and when the sleeping link is woken by means of network management, labor maintenance costs are increased, and the sleeping link cannot be woken automatically.